Full awakening itself is qualityless when we’re talking about full realization of the Self, which means that you know that you are Pure Consciousness and everything else is also Pure Consciousness. That’s the highest state of realization you can enter into. That turns into sahaja samadhi, which is a kind of relaxation, a kind of returning into your ordinary consciousness, an ordinary consciousness that is full of all of these realizations but in an unstated way.
Everything kind of settles down again. There’s no more craving for any kind of spiritual experience. All of those cravings have been met. And in sahaja samadhi, there’s a delicious kind of quality that dawns, something that is at ease with the endless flow of experience in the midst of full and unconditional awakening. In a certain sense, it’s like having the pure liberation of nirvikalpa samadhi built into the waking state so that they’re compatible, Nirvikalpa samadhi meaning unconditional transcendence of the world and human attention. Nirvikalpa samadhi is full internal self-realization.
So, that quality of self-realization that is totally internalized, knowing that I am God or I am that, evolves more in sahaja samadhi so that you could say instead of God being merely stuck within, it’s also seen right on the surface of the flesh, right on the surface of the skin, everything is God. And, nothing is God either. It defeats itself. It transcends itself as a realization. Sahaja samadhi, therefore, is a paradoxical condition. It’s neither enlightened nor ignorant. Yet it’s partaking in both. It’s beyond both. It’s neither. It’s both. So, it’s unstrategized liberation. It’s living beyond any spiritual strategy.
You can also say sahaja samadhi is unmaintained enlightenment, eternally unmaintained. So, you’re free from even all the implications of realization. You don’t mind appearing totally ordinary. Even though you’ve ascended to the top of Mount Everest, spiritually speaking, you just walk around like everybody else. You’re indetectable except when somebody gets close enough to you and they can still smell that rarefied atmosphere of the mountaintop around you because it clings to you. Then people begin to understand that you’ve gone through total cataclysmic change, that you’re completely other than what you seem to be and yet are absolutely what you seem to be, and you don’t care either way.
You’ve stop making that distinction between the enlightened and the unenlightened. It’s the marriage of ignorance and eternal liberation. They fuse and reflect each other. It’s wonderful. All spiritual states point toward that. You might in fact even occasionally revert back into profound mystical states, but they mean nothing. You might wake up and have this grand unified experience of everything being yourself as is discussed in the Gita and other places, the Upanishads, and even that means nothing, so, just continue. Nothing registers anymore. Nothing conditions you.
Do you sense the freedom that’s in that? It’s unspeakable. It’s so radical from a human point of view that you can’t even communicate it with human language. It’s more like an animal state. There’s nothing in human vocabulary to describe this sort of happening. It’s like living in the pure spontaneity of an animal where everything is perfect and yet it’s just an animal. And if you’ve had a pet or an animal that you have paid close attention to, you know what I mean.
So, you transcend all the mystical states that are read about in the scriptures. All of them, even the freedom like I am God, I am everything. Even that flies out the window. It was so powerful when it appeared. You thought you’d never get over it, and it’s really a kind of renunciation in itself to just pass through all of that to become, you could say, that which never tastes anything anymore.
Before you wanted to taste all these high states. You tasted them. You died in them. You merged into them. You got all kinds of liberation, all kinds actually, not just some kind of static definition of freedom, some sterile notion of non-duality. You tasted ecstasy, and currents, and blissful visions, and intoxicating transcendences, all of that. And so each one of those takes a block of you away, and then when you get the last one, everything is taken away. The you is blown out forever.
Even though you take on a conventional identity…. Someone calls your name, you look, you take on that conventional identity. You respond very well to your name being called, which means that something like an ego is still there. Something like a mind is still there, obviously. If you in sahaja samadhi sit down and do a crossword puzzle, you’re using a mind. There’s a mind that’s doing the crossword puzzle, it’s not the Self. The Self will just sit and have this big grin on its face, not with a word in its mouth. But if you’re doing a crossword puzzle you’re thinking, you’re thinking, and so that’s the mind, whatever’s left of it.
Some people argue, there’s a mind, there’s no mind, there’s a mind and it goes back and forth forgetting that this whole discussion is taking place in two-dimensional language. So, you snap that whole illusion of trying to understand this with the linear mind. That’s what makes living this eternally possible. In any event, there’s nothing higher. You can also at that point become an open vehicle for profound spiritual transmission, radiation of the qualities of that qualityless state. The qualities will be dependent on those who are there to receive this everything, this everything that can give anything. It can give current. It can give Shakti. It can give Jnan. It can give Bhakti. It can give the secrets of karma yoga. It can give liberation on any front.
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